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his French director as ‘outre en politique, comme arch-Irlandais’. As he sports his Irish colours here again, for the last time as it transpired, one can imagine him saying that he could well sing his ‘Nunc demittis’, now that Ireland seemed to be on the threshold of being a Nation once again.
    After his return to Ireland, the residence provided for the President was at ‘Glenvar’, just across the road from Clareville. It was in an out­house in Clareville that Eoin MacNeill’s men were screening the inter­cepted mail-bags. In an effort to trace them down, a military cordon was thrown around the area. The college and Clareville were searched with no result, but de Valera was accidentally arrested at ‘Glenvar’. When his identity was confirmed at the Bridewell the news was flashed to London and the instructions from there were that he was to be released immedi­ately. He was released, much to his surprise, at Portobello Barracks. Hav­ing procured an old bicycle he cycled back to Blackrock. He ran in to his old friends Fr Larry Healy and Fr James Burke, who were amazed to see him again. As he ate a hasty meal they tried to puzzle out the reason for his sudden release. In the event of his being around on Sunday it was arranged that he and his secretary, Miss O’Connell, could have mass and dinner at the college. They both arrived and at dinner with Fr Downey and Fr Burke, de Valera produced an envelope with a special seal that had been handed to Miss O’Connell the previous day by Bishop Mul­hern on behalf of Lloyd George. The letter signalled the start of the Truce negotiations. That was Sunday 26 June 1921.

Reading and writing
John McGahern
    I came to write through reading. It is such an obvious path that I hesitate to state it, but so much confusion now surrounds the artistic act that the simple and the obvious may be in need of statement. I think reading and writing are as close as they are separate. In my case, I came to read through pure luck.
    There were few books in our house, and reading for pleasure was not approved of. It was thought to be dangerous, like pure laughter. In the emerging class in the Ireland of the 1940s, when an insecure sectarian state was being guided by a philistine Church, the stolidity of a long empty grave face was thought to be the height of decorum and profund­ity. ‘The devil always finds work for idle hands’ was one of the warning catch phrases.
    Time was filled by necessary work, always exaggerated: sleep, Gael­ic football, prayer, gossip, religious observance, the giving of advice – ponderously delivered, and received in stupor – civil war politics, and the eternal business that Proust describes as ‘Moral Idleness’. This was confined mostly to the new emerging classes – civil servants, policemen, doctors, teachers, tillage inspectors. The ordinary farming people went about their sensible pagan lives as they had done for centuries, seeing all this as one of the many veneers they had to pretend to wear, like all the others they had worn since the time of the druids.
    During this time I was given the free run of the Moroney’s library. They were Protestants. Old Willie Moroney lived with his son, Andy, in their two-storeyed stone house, which was surrounded by a huge or­chard and handsome stone outhouses. Willie must have been well into his eighties then, and Andy was about forty. Their natures were so stress-free that it is no wonder they were both to live into their nineties. Old Willie, the beekeeper, with his great beard and fondness for St Ambrose and Plato, ‘the Athenian bee, the good and the wise … because his words glowed with the sweetness of honey’, is wonderfully brought to life in David Thompson’s Woodbrook .
    Willie had not gone upstairs since his wife’s death, nor had he wash­ed, and he lived in royal untidiness in what had once been the